Author: stevenedwardjones

Pixel Pour and the Eversion

Over on the Tumblr for my forthcoming book, The Emergence of the Digital Humanities, I’ve just posted about Kelly Goeller’s iconic street-art creation, Pixel Pour. A recent conversation with the artist cleared up for me some questions of timing and materials of this “8-bit” installation and helped me understand the viral spread of images of the work, which has become an icon of the eversion.

Pixel Pour
Kelly Goeller, Pixel Pour
(http://kellotron.com)

Mr. Penumbra and mixed-reality publishing

A recent book review in The New York Times of Robin Sloan’s Mr. Penumbra’s 24-hour Bookstore quotes Kathleen Fitzpatrick on “the anxiety of obsolescence.” As it happens, I’m finishing a chapter that also puts Sloan’s novel alongside Fitzpatrick’s Planned Obsolescence. My argument supports and helps to explain an observation made on Twitter by Matthew Kirschenbaum, that Sloan’s book is “quite likely the first novel of the digital humanities” (Nov. 26, 2012). Sloan (who used to work for Twitter) responded to Kirschenbaum, “Dunno if it’s the first, but I definitely had the digital humanities community in mind while writing it.”

Sloan is part of a group of technologically savvy creative types, writers, designers, book people and typography geeks, who have seen themselves as participating in what they call (taking the term from blogger and designer Jason Kottke), “Liberal Arts 2.0.” Carmody and Sloan co-edited a collection of essays in 2009 called New Liberal Arts, which might in fact be understood as a project in the “vernacular” digital humanities. The collection began as a group blog, was printed as a limited edition chapbook (which sold out), and was also made available online in PDF and HTML forms under a Creative Commons noncommercial license. The physical book, the editors said, was meant to be “a beautiful object,” their way “of keeping faith with the past. For all this fuss about new-ness, we know the score: Books are pretty great techne.”

Sloan’s novel is I think truest to digital humanities now in its expression of a desire for a mixed-reality, physical and digital creative culture, a desire also expressed in almost every interview Sloan has given about the book. It’s a desire that grows out of the real physical/digital maker culture (of which Sloan’s a part). This aspect of the technology culture over the past decade amounts to a central ethos, one that’s only recently starting to be widely reported, and that can too easily be misread as mere nostalgia, or as part of an analog backlash. It’s instead, I think, based on a healthy skepticism about the “frictionless” immaterialities of digital publishing, a way of resisting the easy oppositions between “print” and “digital” that have riven publishing in the past couple of decades. This ethos has much to say to emerging digital humanities scholarship as it tries in a critical way to reinvent its own forms of digital publication and scholarly communication while also turning outward, to address developments in the world at large.

What Fitzpatrick’s book on (mostly academic) publishing expresses so well–and what the MLA Commons project she’s spearheading also addresses–is that publishing in the digital age has to begin by recognizing the constraints and affordances not just of “ebooks” or “screens” versus “pages” but of new publishing platforms. Those platforms have to be recognized as social, mixed-reality “stacks,” layered systems that connect writers and readers through materialities of various kinds, for various purposes, and that for now will participate in “book culture” even as they bridge to other forms of communication, other, emergent forms of making public (which is what publishing means) in this era of the eversion. This is true for a variety of digital humanities experiments both inside and outside the academy.

Analog backlash?

There’s an anti-digital backlash going on, tied to an interest in the “artisanal,” and ultimately connected to the maker movement. Or at least it looks like and anti-digital, pointedly analog backlash. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes gets called the “anti-kindle,” for example, because it allows us to remember the tactile and physical qualities of books (by carving them up with a die-cut method). Appeals to paper and boards and glue and thread, and the weight and feel (and smell) of those things, have recently been made in the context of the artisanal turn in general. Partly this is a countermovement in response to the digitization of everything. As Andrew Piper says, “The more screenish our world becomes, the more we try to insert tactility back into it.” He rightly argues in Book Was There that we’re in a transitional or “translational” moment requiring increased humanistic and technical understanding of what is at stake in the different materialities of our different platforms for reading.

In fact, the most interesting instances of the apparent analog backlash, the bookish resistance to digitization, often contain within themselves the evidence of the very translational complications that may seem at first to be trying to escape. Dave Eggers’ McSweeney’s Publishing has produced a number of books with flagrantly physical bindings, for example, not the least of which is Eggers’ own 2012 novel, A Hologram for the King, with a textured, gold-foil stamped cover. It’s a book that says “Book”–no accident, surely, in a novel that tells the story of a crazy boondoggle to set up a hologram-based communication link in the Saudi desert.

McSweeney’s interest in this area is diverse. In December it will publish musician Beck Hansen’s latest “album,” Song Reader, which as the publisher’s advertisement says, comes “in an almost-forgotten form–twenty songs existing only as individual pieces of sheet music, never before released or recorded.”

Complete with full-color, heyday-of-home-play-inspired art for each song and a lavishly produced hardcover carrying case, Song Reader is an experiment in what an album can be at the end of 2012–an alternative that enlists the listener in the tone of every track, and that’s as visually absorbing as a dozen gatefold LPs put together.

If you want to hear the songs, the announcement concludes, “bringing them to life depends on you.” In a digital era when analog synthesizers, vinyl records, and analog tape recordings are retro-hip, Beck has out-analoged the analog fetishists (like the grandson of a Fluxus artist that he is).

Beck’s preface to the album has just appeared at The New Yorker website.

We started collecting old sheet music, and becoming acquainted with the art work, the ads, the tone of the copy, and the songs themselves. They were all from a world that had been cast so deeply into the shadow of contemporary music that only the faintest idea of it seemed to exist anymore. I wondered if there was a way to explore that world that would be more than an exercise in nostalgia . . . .

But the final twist to the project is that (of course) performances of the songs will be recorded, are already being recorded, by known artists and unknown amateurs, using digital technology and the conventions of social media (of course), and selections of these performances will be posted as videos for download on the album’s official website. So the event or happening that the album is meant to cue is very much what Piper calls a translational event, a hybrid, analog/digital affair, and is ultimately dependent on the Internet for its own successful publication, its being made public, rather than remaining many isolated,  individual experiences with ukeleles and pianos.